Archive for the ‘Australia’ Category
If I’m ever stuck for a topic to write about, I only have to look in my backyard. It’s easy for me to forget the grand, the immense, the weird, the frightening and the frightful milieu of Australia. I’m standing in it and don’t see the really unusual.
Take Coober Pedy for example. Kupa Piti. White Man in a Hole. Which is a precise and accurate name for a town in the middle of nowhere. And I really mean nowhere!
Cobber Pedy is slap bang in the middle of South Australia’s barren Outback desert where it’s too hot for anyone to live It’s the bloody desert for heavens sake!
It’s where the few thousand residents burrow underground to survive, and if you ever want to run away and hide- this is the place to come.
To my great joy I received a Purple Star for this lens.
Roused from sleep on a wintry midnight in 1880, Ned Kelly told a solicitor representing him at the murder hearing due to begin hours later that, regardless of the outcome, all he wanted was a full and fair trial so the public could see that he had acted under strong provocation and was “not the monster I have been made out”.
The remark anticipated the continuing divide between those who regard him as an iconic Australian larrikin and those who damn him as a murdering villain.
Although charged with a capital crime, Ned’s trial in the Melbourne Supreme Court was rushed, taking a mere 2 days. The judge presiding was Sir Redmond Barry.
Barry was unsympathetic to offenders and developed a reputation for harshness. He once sentenced a man to 12 years hard labour – two of them in irons – for stealing a few trinkets from a travelling salesman. As the media reported at the time:
So convinced is he of the hideousness of having the land overridden with fugitive convicts that he doles out to every bondman (ex-convict) that comes under his lash nearly one-half more punishment than he awards to those who, having come to the country free, have deserted the path of virtue.
– The Argus, 15 February 1853
Ned and Judge Barry had a famous verbal clash, ending with Barry declaring the sentence of death with the traditional: ‘May God have mercy on your soul‘. Ned responded “I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there where I go.”
Ned was hanged on November 11th, 1880. Sir Redmond Barry died from a carbuncle on November 23rd. If anyone is in hell, it’s Judge Barry.
Poor old Ned. He was 25 years old.
